“A year ago,” said law professor Ross Buckley on Australia’s ABC News last week, “nobody wanted to know the International Monetary Fund. Now it’s the organiser for the international stimulus package which has been sold as a stimulus package for poor countries.”

The IMF may have catapulted to a more exalted status than that. According to Jim Rickards, director of market intelligence for scientific consulting firm Omnis, the unannounced purpose of last week’s G20 Summit in Pittsburgh was that “the IMF is being anointed as the global central bank.”

Informative Ellen. But I have always taken it for granted that the IMF was going to be the global central bank. And if it were one of its siblings, the BIS or WB, how would that make an appreciable difference?

I suspect the significance of this article will be lost on most people: that it’s just another nail in the lid of our democratic coffin. Or another global plank in the platform of plutocracy. 😦

US net debtor status isn’t the result of the dollar’s global role in trade, but of a cock-eyed balance of payments caused by excessive US borrowing. The value of the dollar is built on US productive capacity. Rather than producing wealth, the US has become a financial economy, printing dollars instead of producing real wealth. The dollar losses value, inflates, in direct proportion to collapsing US production & accumulation of debt through deficit financing. not as a result of the dollar’s role in international trade.

I don’t see Triffin’s dilemma, as such. The problem is the “financial economy”, the banks, all the banks involved in each national central banking system. These central banks of each nation, are the engine of the global financial economy. To the extent that each nation engages in deficit financing, which has created the present crisis in the US, then every central banking system requires a bail out as has happened here.

Ellen points out the new role of the IMF as the agency for providing these global TARP funds. The IMF as a slick “debt consolidator”, buys up the bank loans in each country and assumes the creditor role. This allows for a global “quantitative easing” for each distressed central bank while ensnaring the people in new terms. Instead of dollars, they now owe “SDR’s”. The question is, what is an SDR worth in terms of dollars or euros or yen?

As a nascent global currency, the SDR becomes a new benchmark currency, but its value is anyone’s guess. It’s just sleight of hand, a new wrinkle in the globalizing financial economy. Just as the value of new “financial instruments” in the derivative market are unknowable because they are divorced from the real wealth of productive activity, which establishes the only value and meaning of money, an abstraction such as the SDR cannot be valued.

The financial economy becomes more irrelevant than ever to real economic life. Raising interest rates is not in the cards in a global deflationary spiral. The SDR is irrelevant and the idea of a global central bank has no force because the financial economy is not in a sustainable orbit around the real world. It is about to spin off into outer space. The only way the wealth holders in this financial economy can enforce their claims is by force.

The wealth elite has forfeited it’s claim to financial hegemony through its failure to manage a sustainable financial system. It must either write down its paper losses and remake the financial system on a more just and sustainable model or go to war with the majority of the world’s people.

Great post Joseph. I was with you all the way up to that closing paragraph… your last clause actually. It’s not really the numbers of people that matter. It’s those who have the will and means to resist, or contest the edicts handed down by the global power elite – the IMF or whoever they might designate as their front agency or enforcer.

“They” (the wealth-holders) have all the weapons, the police (secret and otherwise), the armies, the navies, the Air Forces, the Missles, the Nukes, the Radar Waves, the HAARP Machines, the Lasers, the Ultra-sonic devices, the communications, the organization, the spy networks … well, you get the picture. “They” could care less if their model is “sustainable”. All “they” look at is the bottom line in profits and power.

“We” have righteous moral indignation and a need to feed our families. And a few small arms and slingshots, not to mention some shovels and pitchforks.

Yep, I guess they’ve “forfeited” all that power they’ve amassed because we say so.

Look at it this way, Jere: the “global elite” is a group that numbers approximately 6 million. ( Reference “The Super Class”). This includes the dynasties of inherited wealth, the 1% in the US and everywhere else. In the developed world, they are not 1% of the total population, and globally not even .5%.

They survive and prosper through the manipulation of republican ( AKA “democratic” ) political structures because they could not rule the masses through Stalinist, confrontational, repressive means. 1776 ended direct tyranny. Not even the CCP deals with complete impunity with the Chinese people. In 2005 there were 87,000 “mass incidents” in China. In the world’s largest totalitarian political system, the Party has to use more finesse than force.

Elite control is concealed as far as possible behind a benevolent facade BECAUSE IT CANNOT DIRECTLY CONFRONT THE MASS POPULATION WITHOUT CREATING COMPLETE CHAOS. Ben Bernanke bails out the failed banking system not simply to protect the interests of his class, but to prevent a broad societal collapse that would guarantee the destruction of his class. Believe it or not, they know we are all in this together. This is not a dewy-eyed “we are the world” sentiment. It is a fact of life that has little to do with any benevolent feelings.

The left is still having George Orwell’s nightmares. Fear of the power of the totalitarian state is obsolete. Sure, the Party snuffed the radicals of Tienanmen Square, but it nonetheless had to give the people capitalism to console them because the fact is the State cannot ultimately control a mass population in this time of mass communications.

1984 has come and gone. The new nightmare is chaos, the breakdown of social order in a world of WMD. The masses cannot ultimately be directly coerced; they must be seduced, as for example through state terror ( 911 ), strategic assassination, and other deceptions through which the invisible hand guides events, or tries to.

Bernanke and Paulson were not faking when they informed the legislators of an imminent meltdown of the financial system. Their terror was genuine. They have nightmares of CHAOS and are desperately seeking a New World Order. They congratulate themselves over the success of their bail outs. But as Ellen points out, it is a pyramid scheme destined to fail again.

The power they have comes from the consent of the mass of the governed, which they strive to manufacture via covert ops. Ron Pauls’ campaign received a considerable influx of contributions from the military. “They” do not have dictatorial control over the military.

To prevent chaos, the common enemy, they must reorder the system to simulate more economic justice, OR, a new model must emerge from the people, people like Ellen or you or me. Wake up from the Orwellian nightmare and get really scared. The new nightmare is expressed in “Dark Age Ahead” by Jane Jacobs, for example. Al Gore has been constructing his own vision of the dark age ahead. James Lovelock is positively hair raising.

The notion that Big Brother is just waiting to impose law n’ order is just silly. If only that were possible! The American people were ready and willing to make FDR a Dictator. After all, Mussolini was so successful!

It seems to me that the key point here is that the “Anglo-American monetary elite” are attempting to keep control of the US economy so that they can continue to manipulate the money and financial system for their own selfish benefit. Obviously, the debt level of the US government is unsustainable. So… putting the political and money pieces together it seems obvious that the rush to pass the “Healthcare Reform” and “Cap and Trade” legislations, which will be fantastic tax revenus sources for the US Treasury, are to be the new revenue sources for the “Anglo-American monetary elite.” So.. as more of our money is collected by the “money elites” collection agency — aka the US Treasury and IRS — it can be filtered to the banksters via the IMF as well as the already existing channels. Wonderful? NOT!

948. May 17, Interview on Al Jazeera, in which Ellen Brown gives her critique of President Trump’s approach to infrastructure. Part of coverage of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s “Infrastructure Week”. Watch it here.

947. May 13, Bring On the Power of a Public Bank for CA: People’s Forum, L.A., 3 pm. Info here. At the beautiful PUENTE Learning Center DTLA in Boyle Heights: https://www.puente.org/locations/

946. May 2, presentation, The Web of Debt and the Deep State: How do we break Free? Info here.